Ellen Pao resigned as interim CEO of Reddit on Friday. Here’s the email she sent to Reddit employees:

Team,

After eight months as interim CEO of reddit, I am resigning today by mutual agreement with the Board.

I am so proud of all the progress we’ve made since November. Our work isn’t and hasn’t been easy — reddit is a genuine living entity, with its own spirit and will. The importance of our work, as caretakers and stewards of this ecosystem, resonates far beyond reddit itself — it sets an example for the rest of the Internet on what the free and open exchange of ideas ought to be.

You rose to the challenge. We became “one company-one team,” merging three offices into one, hiring a world-class leadership team, recognizing key contributions from long-standing reddit employees, doubling the size of our overworked community team and working more effectively as a cohesive whole. We learned from show and tells, lunch and learns, our speaker series, our first budgets and product plans, and our first performance reviews. And, most importantly, we learned from each other, by remembering our humanity and trying to reflect it in our interactions with each other and with our community.

I’m honored to have been part of a team so dedicated to our users and communities. On the engineering side, we discovered what users actually want through surveys, test groups, staging servers and our first data warehouse. From a design perspective, we introduced user research and user experience to reddit.com as a top priority. And we improved extensive site performance and reliability to give users more stability and faster response times.

We grew our user base 70% over last year, moved from 29% to 47% mobile usage, and shifted our business focus from experimental initiatives to growing sustainable, non-intrusive revenue streams of ads and gold. All of these successes position reddit well for economic viability, which is critical to reddit’s long-term prospects.

On the community side, we’ve taken bold and often controversial stances, but always with the greater good of the community in mind. We’ve been a leader for all Internet sites worldwide on how to balance the needs of an organic, thriving community with the safety and privacy of all our users. We were first to ban stolen nude photos from our site, protecting privacy for all people not just redditors, and others sites followed our lead. We tackled the thorny issues of harassment on the site, banning harassing behavior without censoring ideas. Though we came under fire on many fronts, we did not waver, working 24/7 to try to keep the site harassment-free. Through these trials, we’ve labored side by side, through the blood, sweat and tears, and our community is emerging the stronger for it.

So why am I leaving now? Ultimately, the board asked for higher growth in users in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while holding to reddit’s core values. You will be in good hands — our strong leadership team will now be led by Steve Huffman, one of reddit’s original co-founders. Like Alexis, he’s lived and breathed reddit since its inception and will work passionately to ensure reddit’s success.

Thank you for all you’ve done together for reddit. Your passion and commitment to making reddit reddit are inspiring, and I’m going to enjoy seeing the great ways you bring reddit forward. I have learned so much from all of you and my time here, especially to always remember the human. I am going to really miss you.